Becoming Mexican American

Sánchez opens with the story of Zeferino Ramírez, a prominent Mexican businessman and community leader in Belvedere, East Los Angeles, who presided over a community meeting in June of 1927 regarding a plan to incorporate Belvedere as an official municipality. This issue was of concern to the area’s residents because incorporation would allow the city to raise their taxes, ultimately forcing working-class Mexican homeowners to sell their property in a depressed market. This strategy had been used in other areas of Los Angeles to transform less affluent neighborhoods into expensive suburbs that were only accessible to wealthy Anglo Americans. However, when some allies of the Mexican immigrant community argued that Belvedere’s residents should file for naturalized citizenship so that they would be eligible to vote against incorporation, Ramírez and his peers refused.

Zeferino Ramírez’s life in Los Angeles encapsulates the experience of many Mexican immigrants in the United States in the early 20th century who were forced to adapt their culture to their new environment. Although historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have debated issues of immigrant acculturation for decades, Sánchez observes that for many Chicano historians, Mexican immigrants in the United States have always existed between “two cultural poles: ‘Mexicano’ […] ‘versus Anglo United States’” (6).